Ask HN: What is next after your launch doesn't go as planned?
You refresh the analytics. A few hundred visitors, a handful of signups, and then nothing. And the questions start. Was it the timing? The wording on the landing page? The video? Or is it the product, the one you spent months building and thought you had validated?
That last one is the one that actually hurts, because it makes you rethink every decision you were confident about a week ago.
I think the answer is to go back to the data and find the leak. Whether people arrived, whether they understood it, whether they tried it, whether they came back. Each of those failing means something completely different and most of us collapse them into "the launch failed."
But I've only done this a couple of times and I'd rather learn from people who have done it more. If you've had a launch go nowhere: what did you actually change, and how did you work out which part was broken? Did anyone here find that the problem was genuinely the product, and what did you do about it?
Currently sitting in exactly that spot :)